It’s almost entertaining at this point to see how out of touch they are. Many Proton users chose them because they were supposed to be the anti-techbro alternative to Google and Micro$oft, and alas, instead of actually taking a look in the mirror, they double down instead.

It seems most of these were likely just in a backlogged mod log.

You deserve better. This is not the norm.

Yeah, this guy is definitely part of the problem.

‘Richard’s’ post and comment replies really just cement that existence of a toxic culture all around at Proton. Likely the opposite of his intention.

I’ve worked with Andy for many years, and he has always been hard to work with for some people, this is not new, but it’s also not at the level 404 portrays it.

For any sane person, Andy’s comments and this attitude toward them confirm that management is out of touch with what a supportive work culture is.

This, combined with their drive for more and faster, when much of their userbase just wants secure and stable shows they are not the service provider for me, anymore.

I feel like their Uservoice forum might have been part of what led them to stray from this foundation of strong email. After the posts calling to oust Andy, there are a number of posts asking for features that are really quite out of scope of what you would expect from even a full productivity suite.

I’m being (perhaps overly) optimistic that this might be the last straw for Andy, but we’ll see.

The official proton account had this to say over on that other site:

It hasn’t been the best couple of days.

We’ve read the various threads and we have heard your feedback. However, right now we need to focus on listening to our employees. They’re the ones who’ve gotten us to where we are today, and they’re the ones who are impacted the most.

We love this community, and we will come back to you. But in the days ahead, we need to get our house in order first

I’m hoping getting their house in order means kicking Andy Yen and Bart Butler out of it…

Odd. I was able to read the whole thing initially, but I also now see the paywall.

Either way, 404media is a fairly reputable journalistic outlet. The article also included CTO Bart Butler’s AI Manifesto, which corroborate the employees’ comments. I don’t see any reason to believe the reporting here is false, especially after the release of Proton’s AI re-interview email earlier this week.

I’m searching for alternatives too. So far promising options are (in no particular order):

• Tuta
• Mailbox.org
• Posteo

They have some differences in offerings, so you’d have to explore which best fits your use-case. I’m leaning toward Mailbox.org with self-hosted OpenCloud for a ‘cloud’ drive.